FamHist FAQ

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Frequently Asked Questions These question/answer items are hardly comprehensive. At the beginning they only cover certain matters concerning use of the Common Law plea rolls. Even in that area, more will be added as we get questions. And coverage will be expanded to Chancery and Exchequer records if it seems researchers are using those materials for family history. The most important thing to realize is that the documents were written for legal purposes, not for historical purposes or even with recognition that historians in the future might use them. So the information we want may not be clear or even possible to ascertain, but if one understands the legal reason for something to be inserted into a legal record, one may deduce quite a bit that is useful.

Marginations: What can I deduce from plea roll marginations? There are various kind of marginations in the plea rolls: (a) the main county margination to the left of the first line of a case entry, (b) various additional marginations not referring to counties; and (c) from the sixteenth century on county marginations for proclamations. (a) The main county margination indicates the county whose sheriff will be ordered to execute the process; it does not indicate the residential county of the plaintiff. The county of the margination is the county within which the real property under litigation is located, the debt was actually incurred, or the wrong was done. The major exception to this began in the early mid-fifteenth century, when lawyers were increasingly allowed to specify London (and, soon, also urban areas that became counties) in the margination falsely. The incentive for a London margination was, in the individual case, either procedural (the linchpin of the process for securing the defendant's appearance was the civil outlawry process, and that was much faster in London and other cities) or jurisdictional (it allowed, with other process, for the court of Common Pleas to resolve cases deriving from Wales or various high liberties that were otherwise immune from Common Pleas process.) As long as these exceptions are kept in mind, the main county marginations are very useful for finding cases involving plaintiffs or defendants whose county residences are already known, but cannot be used to prove a county residence, since people had dealing outside their own county. (b) Non-county Marginations. Procedural notations were made in the marginations occasionally to indicate moneys that had to be collected from amercements or to indicate later events, like the lodging of a writ of error on the case. By and large, these non-county marginations are not helpful for family history purposes. (c) Proclamation county marginations. Once lawyers could falsely a London (or other urban county) margination for litigation in the court of Common Pleas, a means had to be found to ensure actual notification of the defendants that they were being prosecuted. In the sixteenth century and after, therefore, outlawry process (that would take place in the main margination county and not necessarily in the residential county) had to be accompanied by a proclamation to take place in the defendant's county of actual residence. Almost always this resulted in a second county margination that indicated the county of actual residence of the defendant and thus the sheriff who would be ordered to make the proclamation. These civil outlawry proclamation marginations are thus very helpful for family historians. Specification of an incorrect county for the proclamation was grounds for voiding the process, so plaintiffs were careful on this matter.

Plaintiff's Place of Residence / Status: How can I determine the plaintiff's place of residence? The plea rolls do not offer much help in ascertaining the plaintiff's residence, except as an incidental indication from the facts of a case. Frequent litigaton with the same county margination, however, should raise a strong suspicion of the likely county residence. The mention of the plaintiff, however, will usually indicate the status (earl, baron, baronet, knight, gentleman, armiger (=esquire), but not yeoman, husbandman, or laborer. The sheriff would not need the plaintiff's details to execute process, since the plaintiff's attorney would been dealing on his own with the sheriff.

Defendant's Place of Residence / Status: How can I find the defendant's place of residence or status / occupation? The Statute of Additions of 1413 required details for the defendants. Thus the defendant/s were mentioned with place of residence and status or occupation. Women were mentioned usually only as wives, spinsters, widows, or daughters. More complicating for family historians, defendants in the fifteenth century and after were often named twice (helpful in that it gives a second chance for accurate reading of a name) but with different residences. Do not think that this means that they had a residence in both places; usually the first is a false description to go along with the false main county margination (such as "London"), although on occasion the false description is entered in second place. The proclamation in an outlawry order can often help decide which is the true county of residence, but, even without that, some thought about the purpose of the false designation can yield a confident elimination of the false place of residence. Sometimes the two mentions of a defendant's name can contain different status or occupation information for the same person without explanation. Sometimes this difference can denote a change in the defendant's standing over time (as when the occupation or status is copied from a relevant obligatory bond in one and the current occupation or status in another) or can indicate a person who can be described in either way (such as a yeoman who is also a part-time smith, tailor, or carrier).

Debt Litigation Debt litigation can produce some seemingly obvious deductions that are false. The first is a case of debt against several defendants indicates that the defendants are associates. In trespass cases, that deduction is probably valid. In debt, however, a plaintiff can, with one writ, bring any number of different cases against separate individuals who are not connected in any way, recognizable by assigning different sums owed by different parties. The second is that all debts are the same, when they are not. The situation of a debtor who has borrowed to invest in renting more land or begin an occupation is very different from a debtor who is struggling to survive; both of those are different from debtors who have gone surety for another person's appearance in court (one of the normal reasons why two or three people each owe the same amount, often £40 and £100 or some other similar sum to the same person. Debt cases usually are not forthcoming about what was happening. They clearly say something important about the people involved, but precisely what is indicated is normally unclear without further documentation. :